Hardly any play written since 9/11 isn't in some way informed by it. But, 10 years later, why is it that the one play with the most illuminating, specific things to say about America's role in the new world — Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul" — was written two years before the attacks?

Playwright Jason Grote — who gave it a mighty shot with his "Arabian Nights"-inspired "1001" at the Denver Center — blames economics and fear among arts administrators.

The American best play of the past 10 years, most concede, is Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County" — a vicious family drama that captured the corrupted ideals of Bush's America as they play out far from ground zero in Oklahoma, where a family that lifted itself out of Dust Bowl poverty is now brutally disintegrating in its own greed and addiction. It gets at 9/11 anxiety from the side.

But is any play "the best 9/11 play" of the past 10 years? Many of them successfully address various aspects of the era, but Grote says none has captured "the combination of debt-driven economic fever, culture war, militarism, creeping authoritarianism, incipient apocalypse and technological revolution that characterized the last decade."

Partly, because art needs time to catch up. Grote points out that the defining play of the Reagan era, Kushner's "Angels in America," won its Pulitzer five years after Reagan left office.

Plenty of plays have come close — among them Neil LaBute's "The Mercy Seat," Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros' "Omnium Gatherum," Rajiv Joseph's "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," "Rasmina Reza's "God of Carnage," Sheila Callaghan's "Dead City," The Civilians' "Gone Missing" and Claire Bayley's "The Container," among them. That only two of those plays have been taken on by local theater companies speaks to this being a decade of artistic conservativism.

And theater itself has shrunken in scope in that time — and in identifiable ways. Budgets are tight, thanks to the economy.

"I could easily name half a dozen TV shows that encapsulated the Bush decade, and a handful of films, but no plays to speak of," said Grote, "a situation I credit to low budgets, small cast sizes, and unimaginative critics and theater administrators more than to the plays themselves."